Author of TURQUOISEBLOOD

last month!

They paused at the base of the staircase. Here green torches burned at intervals around a low room. On the far wall, iron bars closed in a prison cell. The cell was part dirt, part metal. There were no people, or fey, inside the cell. Instead, an iron ball rested on a tall pillar.

The steady light of the magic torches gave them confidence, and Phin, Pete, and Val moved forward as one to the cell bars.

Pete wrapped her fingers around the bars and pressed her face in close. But the cell was definitely empty, except for that pillar.

“Okay…” said Phin.

“There’s no door,” Val observed.

Pete said, “Shit,” but actually the problem of no door was a preferable one. She had no idea what the deal was with the iron ball, but the bars she could handle.

Phin beat her to it: “We can Create a tool for the task at hand.” He quoted the Hero grimoire.

“Even when there’s no danger?” asked Val with a frown, half-opening her grimoire as if to check the information.

“We don’t know how to operate one. What about a handsaw? Or like a steel rope? Didn’t someone escape using floss once?”

“Too slow,” said Pete, a chainsaw already forming in her hands. “I’ve used one, when we landscaped the backyards. Move.”

Val and Phin backed up.

“Make safety goggles!” Phin said hurriedly just as she was about to pull the starter rope. Pete sighed, but she closed her eyes and breathed in. As she let out her breath, magic formed around her face. It solidified into chemistry-class safety goggles. She fired up the machine. With careful movements, she cut through the top and bottom of four bars.

As the bars clanged to the floor, she set the chainsaw aside and tossed off the goggles.

The three of them crowded into the cell and stood around the iron ball.

“Should I use the chainsaw again?” Pete was mostly joking. But the ball was small and solid-looking. It was roughly made but didn’t have a weld seam or any other chink. Now that they were closer, Pete could see a silver glow flickering around the edges.

“God no,” said Val. “Hang on.”

She opened the Unseelie grimoire. Her fingers flipped through heavy pages filled with diagrams, spells, foreign symbols, and the occasional plant. She stopped at a page with a drawing of a wrought iron bar. “This is the section on iron. I’m looking for imprisonment spells.”

“I don’t know if anything Samantha would use would be in a grimoire for anyone to see,” Phin pointed out.

Pete looked at the dirt ceiling. Suddenly she was filled with worry. “We should hurry.”

Val spared a moment to glare at her, then went back to the book.

Seconds ticked by. Pete tapped her foot.

“Can you at least translate out loud?” suggested Phin.

Val flicked her hair over her shoulder and humphed. “It’s just talking about native powers…you know, like powers that come from what you’re built of? Iron is the antithesis of fey power, because they aren’t, like, built of it. But iron still falls into Making and Unmaking. It’s still part of the natural world. That’s why humans can touch it. So I think basically Samantha molded this little guy,” she pointed to the ball, “with fey magic, and then infused some more magic into it. That’s why it’s kinda glowing.”

“So it’s double-protected, basically?” Phin said sourly.

“Actually, I think that made it weaker. She forced together two things that don’t want to be together.”

Val fell quiet. That was as far as she’d gotten. She didn’t know how to test that theory, or how to exploit the weakness if it was there.

He and Pete held hands on either side of the iron ball. Val stepped back with her book open, but she wasn’t reading. She watched as the light gathered around them.

Pete gave everything to the magic. Her Divine Light hadn’t blazed this bright since she’d faced the vampires. At first, she squeezed her eyes shut. When she felt her feet lift off the ground she opened her eyes.

She was in another world. Not fey or human. An Other-Other, a deeper-magic-from-before-the-dawn-of-time. Everything was brilliantly white. The only things she could see were her brother and the iron ball between them.

“Open,” she and Phin said at the same time.

The iron ball started to vibrate. It became a gray blur, and then its iron-and-magic makeup simply–fell apart.

All their heads went up toward the voice, and then they all turned back to Dakotah.

“Fuck,” said Phin.

Dakotah had the same thought.

“She’s coming!” cried the Seelie fighter.

Damnshitfuck, thought Dakotah.

“Free the king and queen,” he yelled, and then ran to meet Samantha.

“Dakotah!” his friends called after him, but he didn’t look back.

He made it to the front of the tree as Samantha and her entourage burst over the clearing. Spotting him, she roared a laugh and swooped toward the ground. She alighted, the Unseelie all around her.

Dakotah had not gotten a good look at her before. Now she strode forward and he had time to take her in. Her skin was tree-like, brown and barky. She had glittering wings, bigger than any other fairy. Clothing made of leaves and flowing scraps of fabric were draped over her. Her most fascinating feature was her hair–if it could be called that. Over a moon-shaped face, prairie grass grew in sweeping waves. Here and there small trees were growing, not horns like Dakotah thought he’d seen before. Flowers bloomed and a light dew covered everything. Small birds flitted around her head.

“Guardian,” Samantha said. Her voice was sour. “Meddler. Did it ever occur to you that the affairs of fairy are not yours to control? Give humans an inch of power and they will take the world with it–”

“Sounds familiar,” interrupted Dakotah.

To his surprise, Samantha laughed. The birds in her hair chirped and the grass looked greener.

“At least I remain in the domain of my people,” she said. “But you, and Icarus, and Sunil–” Her hair was frosting over, leaves dropping from trees, grass turning brown. “Humans should remain subject to the fey, as they were in the past. Like animals, close to the nature magic, knowing naught but fear for us.”

“There have been Guardians just as long as fey,” Dakotah said flatly. Was that true? He had absolutely no idea. His knowledge of Guardianship was limited. A lot of it had come from his own experiences. As uncertain as he sometimes felt, he still knew when he was doing something right. When he took on the powers of the fey around him, it felt natural. When he’d connected with the House, it felt right. When Val had first shown him how to raise the Shield, he’d known he was connecting to something ancient and intrinsic, something that came so easily because it was built into his role. He wished he could just cover the whole army with a shield, but he knew that wouldn’t solve anything in the long term.

But he’d stand there and tell lies about being a Guardian all day if necessary, because all he wanted now was to give his friends time to free the king and queen.

~*~

“We cannot follow,” the Seelie knight said to Pete, Phin, and Val. Both he and the bunny soldier looked sick to their stomachs by the iron tree.

“We’ve got it,” Pete said with her usual confidence.

Phin felt, for once, the same confidence. “Guard the outside,” he ordered. He lifted a hand and parted the metal leaves so Val and Pete could pass through.

He followed and let the leaves fall behind him.

Immediately the noise of battle ceased. They were in the small space between the metal canopy and the trunk. Val looked around them nervously. “Should I be helping Dakotah?”

Phin and Pete hesitated. Finally Phin shook his head. “You know the most about magic. We might run into something weird down here. Dakotah knows how to fight, he can hold her off.”

Pete crouched by the trunk. “Plus, if you go out, Samantha might realize Phin and I are here.” She reached out, hesitating just a moment before putting her hands to the trunk. She curled her fingers around a cool handle and pulled. Part of the tree swung open, revealing a dark interior, also made of iron.

“There’s something–” Val pointed. Pete took a step inside even as Phin’s hand fell on her shoulder.

“A body,” said Pete. A shriveled fairy corpse lay on the ground, its fingers reaching for the door.

“What the fuck happened to it?” Val asked.

Pete looked up. The tree was hollow on the inside. “Maybe one of the builders, poisoned by the iron.”

“Sick.”

They passed the body, and two more, as they walked single file into the tree. After a short distance, metal stairs descended into the ground. Pete, in the lead, looked all around. There was nowhere else to go. She led the way down.